2018 just got off to a rip-roaring start, thanks to scathing excerpts from Michael Wolff’s upcoming bombshell of a book, Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House, released yesterday in a New York magazine article. The tell-all will be published by Henry Holt & Co. on January 9, barring any legal battles, as Trump’s legal team is already attempting to block the book’s publication. Meanwhile, Wolff says he has tapes of his interviews, and the book has already hit No. 1 on Amazon, causing the publisher to speed up its release plan. Seems that those sick of Trump’s transparent bluster can’t wait to read more about his daughter making fun of his hair, the hamburgers he eats in bed, or how many members of his internal staff refer to him as a fucking moron.

Fire And Fury appears to lean so heavily on insider information, you have to wonder just how Wolff amassed all of this damaging information about the Trump administration over the course of a year. Turns out it was apparently Trump’s ego, as well as the overall chaos of the current White House, that enabled Wolff to wander around the West Wing without ever signing an NDA. In a essay today in The Hollywood Reporter, titled, “You Can’t Make This S—- Up”: My Year Inside Trump’s Insane White House,” the THR critic describes the fucked-up process that led to this blistering tell-all:

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around—checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the “system,” and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

Advertisement

From that vantage point, Wolff was reportedly able to witness the in-fighting between present and now-former Trump staffs like Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, and Kellyanne Conway, all grappling for control in a leadership vacuum:

To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. “What do these people do?” asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.

Like the other excerpts already released, Wolff’s anecdotes assure that Fire And Fury will be a best-seller, and a window into a White House more chaotic than anyone dared fear. Not mincing words, Wolff ends his essay on these increasingly dire notes:

My indelible impression of talking to [Trump’s staff] and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all—100 percent—came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.